The Meaning of Error

9 For example,I am go to school every day. It is caused by teacher giving more emphasizing on one tense, present progressive tense, so learners overuse it when moving on to a new pattern. On the other hand, Brown said causes of error as sources of error and he classified into 4 categories 10 . a. The first source of error is interlingual transfer. It is the beginning stage of learning second language. It is the negative influence of the mother tongue of learner. In this stage, students are not familiar yet with the use of target language, so they use a previous experience when they learn it. b. The second source of error is intralingual transfer. It is the negative transfer of items within the target language. In this stage, students just learn some of target language, so students apply the structure into a new form and develop it that does not correspond to target language or mother language. c. The third source of error is context of learning. It overlaps both types of transfer. In this stage, „context’ refers to the teacher or the textbook. In classroom, the teacher or the textbook can lead the students to make errors. It can called „false concept’. It is caused there are some error in teachers explanation or textbook presentation. d. The last source of error is communication strategies. In this stage, students have to use their production strategies for getting the message. But sometimes it can be sources of error. For this study, the writer uses causes of error from Brown to find out what causes of students error in using simple past tense in writing narrative text. Brown classifies causes of error into four categories; Interlingual, Intralingual, Context of Learning and Communication Strategies 10 H.D.Brown, Principle of Language Learning and Teaching, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1993, p.213-217 10

3. The Types of Error

After analyzing the error and finding the causes of the error, the writer tries to classify error into 2 parts. They are performance error mistake and competence error error. To analyze which error as performance deviation or competence deviation is very hard. It needs the deep analysis to give the distinction both error and mistake. To know the type of error needs a process of analysis. Threre are so many types of error based on how the linguist’s views. Some classify type of error based on error taxonomy. They are:

a. Error types based on Linguistic category

This type of taxonomy carries out specification of errors in term of linguistic categories. Dullay proposed this type of error and explained that many errors taxonomies have been based on linguistic item which is affected by an error. This linguistic category indicates on what level in which component of the language the error is located. We have known that language component here includes phonology, syntax, morphology grammar, semantic and lexicon meaning and vocabulary, and discourse style. And this type also explains where the error occurs. If it is in grammar level, what is it? It is possible occurs in auxliaries, forms of verb, and other grammar elements.

b. The surface strategy taxonomy

This is the second type of descriptive taxonomy proposed by Dullay. He explained that this error type explains on how the surface structure changes. It is possible for the language learners to omit and distort sentence item they create or may be they add unnecessary sentence item in the sentence. Generally this type of error can be classified as follows: 11 1 Omission Omission errors occur when an element of the sentence that should be presented is omitted or by the absence of an item that must appear in a well- formed utterance, and it often occurs in form of morphemes. There are two main types of morphemes: lexical morphemes and grammatical morphemes. 11 Heidi Dulay, et al., Language Two, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 138